In SQL Server one way we optimize code is by adding indexes. Indexes help queries by essentially letting the engine know “hey, here’s the fast way to get directly to the data you want”. The alternative is doing full table scans to read all the data, which sucks.

The Enterprise Policy Management Framework (EPMF) team is proud to announce the updated release of “Enterprise Policy Management Framework 4.0 for project EPMFramework. This is a major release with lots of performance tweaks and

Not to try and steal Satya Nadella’s thunder today at WPC but I’ve got some exciting news of my own to share. I’m excited to say that I’ll be fulfilling a lifelong dream and going to work for Microsoft!

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by yours truly. Our topic this month is simply the Cloud. If you work in IT there’s approximately zero chance that you’ve managed to avoid this word in some respect. Has your manager asked you to look into what cloud solutions can do… Read more

Welcome to this month’s (November 2013) edition of T-SQL Tuesday. For those not familiar this is rotating blog party that was started by Adam Machanic (@AdamMachanic | blog) back in 2009. Want to catch up on all the fun to date? Check out this nice archive (link)… Read more

Just a quick note to let you know about a few upcoming presentations I’ll be doing. This week I’ll be presenting remotely for the Washington DC PASS User Group, PASSDC (event link). I’ll be presenting “Do More With Less: Consolidate and Virtualize“. Since all the stuff… Read more

For today’s post I’m channeling my inner Brian Kelley (Blog | Twitter) and talking about security, in particular Internet security. The post today is actually an email exchange between myself and my younger sister. She asked me for some general advice and I wrote a long… Read more

This is just a quick post to share a lesson learned while I was on an engagement where the client’s reporting environment was using SAP Business Objects (BO)running on Linux for reporting. We were doing a test to move the underlying data warehouse from another database platform to SQL Server… Read more

I’m happy to officially announce that I’ll be presenting at this year’s PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC! I’ll be presenting my talk “What is a BI DBA?” as a Spotlight Session (90 minutes). This is the second time I’ll have presented at the Summit and I’m honored and beyond excited… Read more

This is just a quick tip to help with folks who present SQL code at events such as SQL Saturday. While most presenters use tools like ZoomIt (which if you present, please please learn to use this wonderful, free tool) sometimes it can get nauseating for attendees to watch you… Read more

First off, I’m sorry this space has been dead for so long. I’m sure I’ve dropped off many an RSS reader (as well as SQLRockstar’s Rankings) due to inactivity. Well, it’s high time I get back on the blogging wagon! So what’s happened since the last post (YIKES!) in… Read more

Do you like training? Do you like FREE training? Then make sure you check out the 24 Hours of PASS event that starts today at 12:00 GMT. If you miss the events of the day, no worries, the recordings will be up within a few weeks.

SELECT * FROM…when administrators see that from developer code, we generally tend to cringe. Why? In a nutshell, it’s terrible on a few fronts. First, typically that SELECT * FROM that gets written (a lot of the times) lacks a WHERE clause. What’s the problem? Well, that pulls back every… Read more

Being a DBA is like being a train conductor. One of the biggest responsibilities is making sure all jobs are running as expected, or making sure “all the trains are running on time” so to speak. As my partner-in-crime Devin Knight (Blog | Twitter) posted earlier, we… Read more

Today’s Monday Morning Mistake issue is another painfully common one that we all run into at some point. You’ve got some new code given to you by a developer that’s supposed to be ran against QA (because you’re a good DBA and you don’t grant developers access to anything outside… Read more

Pragmatic Works has now released version 3.5 of the award-winning BIxPress software! For those not familiar with BIxPress it’s a tool that helps you develop SSIS/SSAS solutions faster, easily/quickly deploy SSIS packages, monitor performance SSIS packages and much, much more!